Dream Man Read Online Free

just a little bit too interested. It was amazing how often a murderer would hang around.
    He shrugged into a navy jacket and grabbed the spare tie out of the backseat, loosely knotting it around his neck. Somehow, he noticed, Trammell had managed to impecca-bly tie his own tie in the car. He looked again. Damn, he didn’t believe it! The dapper bastard had chosen a double-breasted Italian suit to wear on his day off. He’d simply slipped into the suit jacket as they’d left the house. Sometimes he worried about Trammell.
    They showed their badges to the policeman at the door, and he stood aside to let them enter.
    “Sheeit,” Dane said in an undertone as he got a good look.
    “And all the other bodily excretions,” Trammell replied in the same disbelieving tone. Murder scenes were nothing new. After a while, cops reached the point where violent crimes were pretty routine, in their own way. Stabbings and shootings were a dime a dozen. If anyone had asked him half an hour earlier, Dane would have said that he and Trammell had been detectives long enough that, for the most part, they were unshockable.
    But this was different.
    Blood was everywhere. It was splattered on the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. He could see into the kitchen, and the bloody path wound from there through the living room, then into a small hallway and out of sight. He tried to imagine the kind of struggle that would have sprayed blood so extensively. Dane turned to the uniformed policeman who was guard-ing the door. “Have the crime lab guys showed up yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Shit,” he said again. The longer it took the crime lab, or forensics, team to arrive, the more the crime scene would be compromised. Some disturbance was unavoidable, unless the forensics boys were the ones to discover the victim and immediately secured the area. But forensics wasn’t here, and the house was crowded with both uniformed and plainclothes policemen, milling around and inevitably mud-dying the evidential waters.
    “Don’t let anybody else in except for Ivan’s guys,” he told the officer. Ivan Schaffer was head of the crime lab team. He was going to be really pissed off about this.
    “Lieutenant Bonness is on the way.”
    “You can let him in, too,” Dane replied, his mouth quirking.
    The house was middle-class, nothing out of the ordinary. The living room was furnished with a couch and matching chair, the required coffee table and matching lamp tables of genuine wood veneer, while a big brown recliner had the best spot in front of the television. The recliner was occu-pied now by a dazed-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, probably the victim’s husband. He was giving mono-syllabic answers to the questions put to him by another uniformed officer. The victim was in the bedroom. Dane and Trammell forced their way through the crowd and into the small room. The photographer had already arrived and was doing his job, but for once was noticeably lacking in his usual nonchalance.
    The nude woman lay jammed in the cramped space between the bedside table and the wall. She had been stabbed repeatedly— hacked was a better description. She had tried to run, and when she had been cornered in the bedroom she had tried to fight, as evidenced by the deep defensive wounds on her arms. She had been nearly decapi-tated, her breasts mutilated by the sheer number of wounds, and all of her fingers had been severed. Dane looked around the room, but he didn’t see the missing digits. The bed was still neatly made, though splattered with blood.
    “Has the weapon been found?” Dane asked.
    A patrolman nodded. “It was right beside the body. A Ginsu knife from the kitchen. She had a whole set. It looks like they really do what the ads say; I think I’ll get my wife some.”
    Another patrolman snorted. “I’d rethink that idea if I was you, Scanlon.”
    Dane ignored the black humor, which all cops used to help them handle the ugliness they saw